Quote of the Day

The Bible assumes that we have more than enough self-concern. We dress ourselves. We get depressed when things don’t go our way. We can be consumed with what someone thinks about us. But cultural assumptions have blinded us. We no longer see the smog we live in. So pastors of many growing churches preach almost weekly about healthy self-esteem, as if it were taught on every page of Scripture. Too man Christians never see that self-love comes out of a culture that prizes the individual over the community and then reads that basic principle into the pages of Scripture. The Bible, however, rightly understood, asks the questions, “Why are you so concerned about yourself?” Furthermore, it indicates that our culture’s proposed cure—increased self-love—is actually the disease….[Edward T. Welch, When People Are Big (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing, 1999), p. 81]